You thought the schedules were stuffed to bursting point with cooking shows? Me too. We were wrong. Food is now a national obsession. They just keep on coming; loosen your belt another notch.

And if you want to get on television, this is the way to do it: call the TV people up, tell them your idea, and that's it, you're on. You're no cooking expert? No matter, look at Greg from MasterChef. There just needs to be something about you, some sort of selling point.

So what's Lorraine Pascale's USP, apart from the fact that she's named after a quiche? Her winning smile, I think. It's absolutely lovely. All of her is, to be honest, she's very, very pretty – about a billion times more so than Greg from MasterChef. So pretty that before she was a TV chef she used to be a top model.

What are we going to learn to make, then? I'm thinking minimal, probably, a big white plate with three pale strips on it: one stick of celery, one line of coke, one cigarette. Mmmm. With a flute of Moët to wash it down, and some kind of diuretic pill or laxative for afters ...

Oh, quite the opposite. We're talking Home Cooking Made Easy (BBC2). That means chocolate marshmallow fudge, which involves melting together a load of butter, evaporated milk, sugar, chocolate and marshmallows into a big, hyper-calorific, artery-clogging gloop. God that looks disgusting. And look at you, Lorraine, and look at that – I don't believe you've ever had more than the tiniest nibble of this stuff.

It's not all like this. Her roasted butternut squash soup looks healthier, and nice, though hardly exciting. I mean, I'm no great gourmet, but I would have done that myself, without help, pretty much exactly as she does it. Likewise the creamy pasta with mushrooms and parmesan. I do admit I wouldn't have made the pasta myself. Unlike Lorraine, I think life is too short – cutting strips of tagliatelle, hanging them out on a coat hanger to dry, that's just nonsense, isn't it? Obviously, I grow my own rice though, got a small paddy field out the back ...

As well as her recipes, Lorraine has some handy home-cooking hints about what to keep in the kitchen – pasta, rice, tinned cherry tomatoes, sea salt, mustard, garlic, olive oil ... Hang on, maybe I am a great gourmet after all, because I do have most of this stuff. A lot of cooking programmes go too far the other way, do things you wouldn't even dream of attempting. This one has swung back too far – for me, anyway (he says, increasingly cockily). There's nothing to inspire me here, no recipes I'd want to tear out if they were in a magazine. The only thing I would like to tear out here is the host (he says, increasingly seedily). She sits on the steps, alliterative in her pink pashmina, pouting about pasta, parmesan, pancetta, mmmm … stop it!

Back to the food, quickly. This "cake" is a joke. You line a bowl with slices of bought swiss roll, fill it with bought chocolate ice-cream, turn it out, and that's it. That's not home cooking, is it? It's just rearranging.

And here's yet another: There's No Taste like Home (ITV1), a title in search of an idea. Well, there's a kind of idea. Three people come along and cook their favourite family recipes – great-aunt Maria's chicken casserole, great-grandma Elizabeth's pan haggerty, and grandma Gertie's steak and kidney pudding in this episode. Then Gino D'Acampo – a comedy Italian who adds at least one extra syllable to every word and slips a cheeky arm round the ladies – picks a winner, which goes on the menu of a restaurant for a month.

Gino is charming, but again I'm not super-inspired by the food. The steak and kidney pud looks quite nice and rightly wins. The chicken casserole looks like something my mum would have made in 1976. And pan haggerty seems to be some sort of dried out Geordie version of dauphinoise potatoes; is that really a main course, fit for a restaurant menu?

I'm thinking I might enter myself, with an old favourite from my own childhood: Granny Jeanie's runny porridge, garnished generously with the ash from at least one Embassy Red King Size. Mmmmmm.